A touch of fiscal sanity


November 13, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

A touch of fiscal sanity

San Antonio Express-News: Credit President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates for restoring a little fiscal sanity to the military budget. The president signed the 2010 defense authorization bill last month.

At $680 billion, the measure still authorizes plenty of federal spending on programs with questionable value to any military challenges on the horizon.

Budgeting the wars

However, Obama and Gates were able to pare down some of the more egregious examples of politicians trying to use the military budget to score home-state and home-district federal spending. Another sound change is that it authorizes $550 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget as well as $130 billion for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the current fiscal year. That’s an attempt to actually budget those wars. The Bush administration relied on supplemental funding outside the normal Pentagon budget.